Ocean surveillance in a fast changing world. Ian Estaphan Owen; Jaia Robotics

Happy Planet Wednesday! Today we travel to Rhode Island, the ocean state, where, fittingly, the blue economy is thriving.  

Ian Estaphan Owen, Co-Founder of JAIA Robotics didn't grow up in Rhode Island but rather coastal Wales where he became passionate about the ocean. On his road to entrepreneurship, he even did a stint with the British Royal Navy. 

Now a denizen of Bristol, Ian is co-founder of Jaia Robotics, a company innovating in the field of ocean surveillance and monitoring. While the sector is getting populated, JAIA Robotics seems to have a competitive edge thanks to their small, low-cost, modular torpedo-shaped, aquatic drones that can travel solo, or in pods, and have multiple applications. 

JAIA boasts real sales in the US and abroad. His recent Series A round was oversubscribed. 

Transcript

Welcome to the podcast where we celebrate innovation for a happy planet. I am your host, Abigail Carroll. This week, we are traveling to the beautiful state of Rhode Island. Rhode Island has always been known for its coastal communities, but now more than ever, it's making a name for itself in the blue economy startup scene.

Our guest today is Bristol based Ian Estefan Owen, whose company, Jaya Robotics, is disrupting the ocean surveillance world with its high speed, affordable aquatic drones. Let's hear it from Ian.  

ABIGAIL: Welcome to the podcast, Ian.

IAN: Hey, Abby, nice to be on. I'm super excited to talk to you and share. A bit about Jaya and the journey that we've been on.

ABIGAIL: Well, I can't wait to hear more. You have developed these Jaya bots, which are aquatic drones. Tell me a little bit about what, what problem you're trying to solve with them.

IAN: So I've worked in the industry for some time and by [00:01:00] that industry I mean the blue tech industry and I've worked for Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, Bluefin Robotics and the tech that they Produce is really exquisite. And if I look at a company like bluefin robotics, so they develop these autonomous underwater vehicles, they're amazingly complex and very capable products, but because of the complexity. They're really hard to build. They're typically only built in small quantities. So you never really get past the prototype phase in reality, unless you make in hundreds. They're complex to maintain. They're complex to operate. They're mission planning. can have any number of checkboxes, and if you miss a checkbox, you may come back after a mission with no data. Or even worse, you may come back without a vehicle. When they run into millions of dollars, that is not a career enhancing move for anybody. So, what we wanted to provide was an [00:02:00] alternate solution to that using very simple to operate, very simple to maintain, very simple to launch and recover. Aquatic drones.

ABIGAIL: Very interesting. So, what are the applications for these aquatic drones? Like, who, who's really using them?

IAN: So our JayaBots have got at the core a platform that allows them with very minimal modification because of our modular architecture to add new sensors or to add new behaviors that provide solutions to many different customers. And that could be our war fighters and I've got specific examples across all of the forces where they can use them and are using them. It could be for research, or it could be for environmental monitoring. And we have a super program with the U. S. Geological Survey team as part of the Next Generation Water Observing [00:03:00] System program. And a really cool project with a small business innovation research grant with NOAA, that will drop J Bot sort of hurricane hunters, and I can talk more about that later.

ABIGAIL: Yeah. So, well, first, maybe it's best to communicate What is a gybot? What does that look like? I know they travel in pods like whales, , maybe we could talk a little bit more about the actual device so people can have an image in their head when, when we talk about some of the applications.

IAN: So, the J Bot is a multi use aquatic drone. And It can, as you, as you said, right, it can be used in multi vehicle pods, or it can be used as a single vehicle. They're very low cost, they're micro sized, and by micro sized recognizing that you may have international listeners to the podcast, they're about the size of a baseball bat. And for, for folks that may be in the Commonwealth, like the size of a cricket bat. But they're, they're cylindrical. So they weigh about six and a half pounds, they're [00:04:00] about 40 inches long and they travel at high speed, up to 10 knots. And they're equipped with sensors, and the sensors can be very rapidly changed for different applications. I think the one thing that really sets us apart from the competition is, besides all of the things I've just described, is that our software is truly open source. When we started the business. People were very, very skeptical about a company that has open source software, because when you look at the Raytheons and the Lockheeds and the other, you know, the Bluefins, the Hydroids in the market, they protect their software really, really closely.

And, I spent 12 years in the Royal Navy at the beginning of my professional career. And I've worked with these big companies. My wife works for the U S Navy, and it really frustrates me when we have incredibly talented engineers and software developers in our customer. [00:05:00] base, whether it's at the warfare centers, whether it's at universities, and if they want to change a behavior or add a sensor, they have to go back to the OEM.

And the OEM says, well, that's not in scope. That's going to cost X. And six months, a year later, you're still going through a contract amendment or a contract negotiation instead of doing the job. And we've got adversaries either side of our oceans. That probably aren't too concerned about the bureaucracy and they're just getting stuff done.

So Jaya just wants to give our customers the opportunity to get stuff done.

ABIGAIL: Yeah. Interesting. So, how are they powered?

IAN: We have

ABIGAIL: And managed. Yeah.

IAN: yeah, so, so we have, I think one of the kind of really cool things we've developed over the course of the four years that we've been in operation is the JayaBot command and control software. Jaya is a, Jaya is a vision mission based company. [00:06:00] And our vision is to democratize aquatic data collection.

That is the North Star that we are striving to achieve when we do that. Our mission, in order to achieve that, is that we want to provide customers with the ultimate experience. We strive to make sure that simplicity is at the core of everything that we do. Whether that's operating the system, maintaining the system. And all the interactions we have internally and with our customers, collaborators, vendors, and the supply chain, etc. And that's all in the pursuit of creating safe, easy to use data collection tools and data visualization solutions. So, we have a command and control system that we can Plan a multi vehicle mission, a multi jibon mission, within seconds. Everything is kind of pre populated. The user sets the spatial resolution. They set the action they want to perform. They throw the bots in the [00:07:00] water. They hit play. And the vehicles then autonomously execute that mission. And the user can go and do something else.

ABIGAIL: Wow.

IAN: the bots will come back to wherever they've been planned to come back for recovery.

ABIGAIL: That's amazing. And so if there's one bot or there's 10 bots, they will, follow the guidance of whatever was programmed and they will come back.

IAN: Yeah, and at any time during that operation, you can actually select a vehicle and pull that out of the mission and remotely control it, or send it on a separate mission, which at the end of that mission, it will then automatically go back and rejoin the mission that it was in before. One of the other things that I'm super proud of the team for developing is that we've created a Jaya in the cloud instantiation. That allows me to be sat here at the Harrisoft Marine Museum in Bristol and be able to see a Jibot pod operating on the other side of the world. I can see what the [00:08:00] data is collecting, I can see the status of the Jibot, I can send it new missions. So that, that cloud instantiation allows us to operate Jibots from and to anywhere in the world where they have internet connection.

ABIGAIL: Right. So you could have somebody who, isn't technical, who actually goes and puts the Jaya bots out in the water while somebody far away has the technical knowledge of what the mission is and they can put it in. So you could have a lot of secrecy that way.

IAN: Yeah, totally.

ABIGAIL: that would be good for, for defense, defense situations.

You actually mentioned. A defense situation before where you might want to use these JayaBots. And I, I'm interested to know more about that, and you mentioned the U. S. Geological Survey and NOAA were a little bit concerned about these organizations and their funding. Is that going to have an impact,? 

IAN: Let me tackle the question you had there, because it's kind of various layers. I'll talk about the DoD first and come back to NOAA and [00:09:00] USGS. So, we have some really exciting work that we've done with the U. S. Marine Corps and the Transport Brigade in the Army. In order for our, specifically those looking to do beach landings and move equipment from offshore to onshore.

It's very important that they understand the conditions. And the bathymetry of the beaches that they're going to be landing on. And, you know, charts have been developed NOAA does a great job in doing that. And but there are changes to the bathymetry that could be caused by, you know, large weather events, sandbars move riptides corps to develop a system using the core platform of a gybot hydro that can operate from the shore out or from a boat in to characterize the surf zone conditions. We can measure the wave height, the wave period, we can measure the vect current vectors. Operating in the surf zone. So what's the strength of the current? Which direction is it [00:10:00] going? And that's variable. It can change over a tidal cycle, or depending on the waves, and the bathymetry. And the way that the gybots work, they travel at high speed on the surface. They stop. The front of the vehicle is buoyant.

The back of the vehicle is heavy. So it sits and bobs. In a vertical position in the water and to dive it reverses its prop and then dives down through the water when it hits the bottom. We can measure the deceleration so that we can then also give the user an indication. This is a hard bottom or a soft bottom.

There's U. S. Marines have tragically had accidents with some of their amphibious vehicles where they've gone into the surf zone and rolled over, and Marines have been trapped inside and tragically died. We want to, we can provide a Jaya bot system that consists of eight Jaya bots that can survey a section of a beach in 30 minutes that it would typically take 25 recon [00:11:00] Marines eight hours to do at night, and we can do that in 30 minutes.

So we're actively working with the Marine Corps on various operational forces and the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab to develop this capability and transition it to a program of records. also working for that same solution with the transport brigades in the army because they have these landing craft they need to bring it to shore.

In fact, we were down in Virginia, Norfolk area. Last week with the team where we were doing surveys of a beach landing site for a large LCU, which is a landing craft. And we identified that if they'd gone into that area, that there would have been a ground before they could have put down the ramp at the front of the the LCU to offload forces.

So again, super simple application. And then we working with the U. S. Air Force weather groups. To provide, where is it safe for us to ford a river? So, what's the current in the [00:12:00] river? What's the depth in the river? What's the bottom type in the river? And we can do that in a matter of minutes, with nobody going in the water.

And we can do it clandestinely, because the gybots are so small, that nobody can see it. You could do it with a drone, but as soon as you've got a drone in the air they're pretty easy to spot and they kind of make a fair bit of noise.

ABIGAIL: And these are pretty quiet. , I think it's worth noting that these look like sort of torpedoes. They're like little mini torpedoes, just so that when people imagine them you know going on their tail and sitting upright in the water or shooting down, they have sort of fins at the back and a, and, and they're a long pointy structure. 

IAN: You talked about NOAA and the USGS. the NOAA program we have is a small business innovation research grant phase two. After we successfully completed a phase one at the in, in last year this program, we are designing an instrumented parachute.

That's going to go on to a J Bot. And, It's all bundled up into what's called a sonobuoy tube with a gybot, so [00:13:00] they can be launched from a hurricane hunter or any aircraft that's got a sonobuoy tube launcher. When it's deployed, it'll collect 10, 000 feet of atmospherics. When it hits the water, that parachute is detached, and then the gybots can do many, many cycles through the upper ocean mixing layer to collect data that will be transmitted through the National Weather Service using satellite communications so that the weather service understand what are the conditions and these and the goal is to drop the jibots in what we call a picket line in front of an approaching tropical storm. That data will allow the National Weather Service to better inform their models so that when a hurricane is approaching, we've had examples where 8 a. m. in the morning, it's been. A tropical storm or a cat one hurricane, and by midnight it's a cat five. We've had recent examples in Florida where a hurricane has been approaching on one [00:14:00] path and it's veered off at the last minute.

So all the people in one area that evacuated didn't need to, but the people where the hurricane hit didn't know they had to evacuate. So to provide that capability, At an unprecedentedly low cost. I think it's a fantastic opportunity. And with regards to the current administration, if I had a really large property in Florida.

I'd want to maintain the ability for our NOAA capabilities to be able to predict where a hurricane is going to hit and what strength is going to be with ever increasing accuracy and to touch on the U. S. Geological Survey team oh, oh, and by the way, that, we call that Giobot that's dropped out of a hurricane hunter, the Giobot storm,

ABIGAIL: Ah, I love it.

IAN: we have a, we have the Giobot bio, which we are developing Developed for the U. S. Geological Survey team. They have a program called the Next Generation Water Observing System, NGOS. And we've added. In a very short time, like nine, 10 [00:15:00] months a dissolved oxygen sensor, a pH sensor, a fluorometer. I can describe what a fluorometer is in a second. A camera, as well as being able to measure the temperature of the water, the salinity of the water, and the depth of the water, as well as doing wave height, as well as doing bathymetry, as well as doing bottom type, as well as doing current strength.

And that's all in one package. And that's, that's a, it's around 20k to buy one of these vehicles. So it's incredibly affordable and it can be deployed at scale. And because it's so easily, we take a day to train folks on two, we offer a two day training course. As basic training, we offer a five day training course for train the trainer.

So it's really simple to use. So what that provides is, is friction free adoption. And that kind of ties back to our mission, but we want to provide the ultimate customer experience. We all know if you don't like using something, it stays in the cupboard. And it's really important to us that [00:16:00] the folks that use the JayaBot system really kind of find it easy to use and it's enjoyable for them to operate.

ABIGAIL: Yeah. I mean, it does sound kind of fun to be honest. You've got this, this pod of little torpedoes that are out collecting information. So you kind of answered my question because we were talking about the Jayabhat storm and I was interested in what kind of sensors were there, their cameras on that, how are you incorporating these different types of sensors?

What does that, what does that look like? 

IAN: It looks like a, it's a very simple pod that we put on the outside of the vehicle that houses the sensor. And then through that pod, the, the wiring goes on to an interface board that can be used to plug in all sorts of different sensors with minimal integration. Very, very flexible. We had , an opportunity just over a year ago the Marine Corps were using our GIABOT hydros for doing the bathymetry and the, the beach survey [00:17:00] work wave height, et cetera.

And they'd heard that we were looking at adding a hydrophone to make the GIABOT PAM, which is a Passive Acoustic Monitoring GIABOT. We did the integration and added a hydrophone. With the preamplification, with the circuit cards, the electronics to make that all work, it took two months. So those GIBOT PAMs allow the Marine Corps or any of our warfighters to deploy from a beach, from a boat, from wherever, and send these devices out to listen.

For objects that are transiting between two islands, for example, whether it's above water or in the water we're now embarking on an internal research and development project where we are adding the capability to do edge processing, which can then in real time detect that a certain frequency has been detected by the hydrophone.

It'll. Grab that information, compress it, put it in a format [00:18:00] that can be transmitted using iridium comms to a user with an alert saying, Hey, we just heard this and they'll be able to look at that waveform and say, okay, we recognize that this is an ABC and, and do something on ABC. It could be an unmanned underwater vehicle.

It could be a surface vessel. Whatever

ABIGAIL: we're getting spied on, is that what that means, potentially,

IAN: could be, sure. And that's got a port security application as well, where we can be listening at the perimeter of a port for divers or unmanned underwater vehicles coming into a port area.

ABIGAIL: yeah, yeah,

IAN: And we call that the Jaya Bopam, right?

ABIGAIL: right this is fascinating, so you, you mentioned before you were in the British Royal Navy. And you also worked for Sonos for a while. I think that's a really interesting background, and it seems to kind of be coming together in this product. So can you tell me a little bit about where [00:19:00] your inspiration came from and, and how you got here?

IAN: Yeah, I grew up in a small coastal town in South Wales. And it was right on, on, virtually on the beach. And this beach was three miles of Golden sand, depending on which way the wind was blowing, because at one end of the beach was a steelworks, and at the other end of the beach was a chemical works, so if the wind was blowing from the East, it would be covered in coal dust from the ships that would dock in to provide coke for the blast furnaces.

And then if it blew from the west, it would be covered in emulsified oil from stuff that was coming out of the chemical works. If it blew offshore, it's fantastic. There's gold and sand and beauty fraud. So that really kind of really started that my passion for concern about the environment, let's just say that my time in the Royal Navy, I was fortunate enough to be deployed in various interesting places around the world.

One of which was Saudi Arabia. It was kind of. At a tricky time because it was at the we, we was there with my family and we [00:20:00] arrived on July the 18th and I think it was August the 3rd that Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and the family got evacuated, I stayed there, but when Saddam Hussein and his troops, they knocked off all the heads of the oil wells in Kuwait, the, the Arabian or Persian Gulf, whichever you want to call it, was flooded with meters of oil.

And I, I helped set up a, a wildlife rescue center that and ended up managing that even though I was in, in, in my part time where we cleaned thousands and thousands of birds and put them back into the wild. So this kind of passion has kind of grown and working for defense companies and then working for Sonos What Sonos taught me is how you go to scale.

Because in the defense company, you can have like, we'll do a couple of prototypes, and then we go to low rate initial production, and then we go to mass production. And unless you're making thousands, [00:21:00] even hundreds, you're still in a fairly early prototype stage. And it's only when you've made a scale quantity that you really understand this product's ready for market.

So that was a really great, I loved my time at Sonus, I was there for four years, I learned so much. And it was pretty cool, right, to be in the music industry.

ABIGAIL: No, of course.

IAN: So learning how to go to scaling, learning more about the commercial side of business was a really valuable thing that when I combined it with all my defense experience and being a user, where if you press a button and it doesn't work, the consequences can be dire all kind of prepared me, I think, for founding Jaya Robotics with my co founder, Jason, who's our CTO.

ABIGAIL: What was the aha moment where you guys decided to start this? 

IAN: So we're working for another company called Aquabotics. And we developed a bunch of relationships with customers. There [00:22:00] was a, a product that was again, a very, a small product drone. It was really cool, right? But there, there were some gaps in his capabilities and the company shut down is complicated.

It's an Australian board and it was founded in Fall Rivers, kind of long story. And I send out an email to a customer saying, Hey, it's been great working with you. Well, I got a flurry of emails back saying, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. What do you mean? You guys are going away. You're onto something. So that then I had a chat with Jason and said, should we do something?

Should we roll the dice here, throw a bunch of money in and see if we can start Jaya. So we decided to do that. And We talked to customers, we got a set of MVP characteristics. We kept it short. We completely started with a, a white blank sheet of paper. Look at those MVPs and what do we need to do?[00:23:00]

And then in March, 2021, we pulled the team together. Toby Schneider from Goof Ray Kania from Katanya enterprises for product development mechanical engineering to Toby Software ed Ville to support software. And we had a, a product kickoff. We had a PowerPoint slide with a bunch of ideas and used the MVP and a really sketchy picture of a, well, the first Jabar idea.

And we started six months later in September. We launched our first prototype in Narragansett Bay. And Jason and I put a chunk of money in to pay the contract, develop the product get the prototype built. And it was kind of one shot. If this didn't work, I was back looking for a job. And my God, it worked. And it was absolutely like a Eureka moment. Wow. We did at least hundreds of hours of computational fluid dynamics with a company called [00:24:00] HydroComp to get to the unique design and shape that we have. So it wasn't an accident that we got there, but it really was one roll of the dice or we would have been on to something else.

And that was the time in September 2021 that we thought, wow, that's amazing. We've got it. And of course, that is only the very beginning of an incredibly hard journey to find investors, to scale, to commercialize, to find customers, convince them that what is a prototype can be turned into an incredibly useful tool for them to solve some of the tough solutions tough problems that they are, that they are trying to, to solve.

ABIGAIL: But I think, you know, you are a seasoned entrepreneur and I think sometimes one of the advantages that somebody who's been working for a while is, is that they have an opportunity to actually fund personally. That MVP, that Minimum Viable Product, because young 24 year olds coming out of the gate, you know, they don't have sometimes that, that [00:25:00] opportunity.

But it's a bigger gamble in a different sense when you're older, cause finding that job, if it doesn't work out, is a little bit harder.

IAN: I'm incredibly fortunate to have a support infrastructure whether it's friends you know, professional network. And then my wife, Michelle, she, she works for the Navy. She worked at Raytheon. We worked at Bluefin together. She is a autonomous underwater vehicle nerd. So when, when I put together like the plan and said, Hey, Michelle, I think we should put a bunch of our retirement. Savings into starting Jaya. She was a very, very critical reviewer. And if I couldn't pass that test, we weren't going to do it. But if I could pass that test, I had somebody that really understands the AUV market. And she recognized the value and utility that JayaBots could bring [00:26:00] and help disrupt the autonomous underwater vehicle market, especially for shallow water.

Littoral and inland water operations.

ABIGAIL: Yeah.

IAN: So, I, I, I, I would love to say that I was a seasoned, I'm a seasoned entrepreneur. I still think of myself as a beginner. I worked in big business and held, held fairly senior management roles. When I started JIA, I was very confident I knew what to do. Somebody, I wish I'd remember who it was, suggested, Ian, you should join an accelerator program. I, what on earth is an accelerator program? They said, okay, you've got some learning to do here. And they suggested joining MassChallenge. So I put an application together, did a bit of research, still didn't really understand what an accelerator program was, and applied for MassChallenge and was one of the 300 members out of 3, 000 applicants that were in the 2021 MassChallenge cohort.[00:27:00]

And I am so grateful for that advice because I didn't have a clue about a startup. So to go through that program And I'm still in connection with, you know, Hope Hopkins and other folks that were part of the mass challenge team at that time that took us through it. I have some great mentors. And they also taught you the fundamentals, the block and tackling that's needed to build a successful startup, how to do a pitch deck, how to pitch for money.

I didn't know how to do that. So I'm still learning. I learn every day, new things about, so I would not put myself in the seasoned entrepreneur category.

ABIGAIL: I should have said a seasoned professional, I think, because you're absolutely right to make that distinction. It is a very different beast working for somebody else and then going out and working for yourself and starting things, something from scratch.

Yeah, I've been around, I've clearly been around the buoy a few times, right?  

What are [00:28:00] some of the things about being an entrepreneur that surprised you when you, came out of the gate?

IAN: Having worked for some of these larger companies, I never ever thought I would have to do as many PowerPoint presentations and as many pitches. As I have you know, you need the elevator pitch, you need the one minute pitch, you need the three minute pitch, the five minute pitch, the seven minute pitch, the ten minute pitch, the fifteen minute pitch, the thirty minute pitch and they're all different.

And I am absolutely terrible at I cannot, I'd love to be an actor, because I think it'd be fun, but I can't remember lines. So I can't learn the pitch deck. I can't learn the lines. I can't do that, no, I guess, rote recall to say, this is this. So every time I pitch, it's different. And it's really hard if you've got a style like mine, to like, I've got to fit this in a minute.

So that's something I've that's something that surprised me that I thought I could meet that got this [00:29:00] pitch stuff down, not a problem. It's really hard to train yourself to be able to tell the story in a minute in three minutes, and with a manageable amount of pitch decks. 

ABIGAIL: It's a definitely a technical skill, I think you're right, to learn how to do that and to know which one to use too at the right time. Like what information different, people need to hear. 

IAN: We started it was in middle of COVID. So everything's on zoom. So being able to read a room on zoom is really hard. But recognizing that sometimes you need to pivot your story in order to, like, better resonate and connect with the audience that you're in. Fortunately, when I joined Sonos, they were an early Zoom adopter, so I've been doing Zoom calls since 2014 so COVID was no, no, no big deal.

The other thing that surprised me is that it's really, really important to not drink your own bathwater. And [00:30:00] when you're in the, when you have a product, when you have a plan, when you have a vision, when you have your mission, when you really believe in what you're doing, it's very, very easy to become so absorbed in that, that you don't listen to outside feedback or the, I know more than them.

I'm very, very fortunate to have opened up my listening aperture to listen to folks. What I was not prepared for is. The number of no's when you're pitching in the beginning, there were so many no's. Nope. We don't do tech. Nope. We don't understand blue tech. Nope. You guys are DOD. That was back in 2021 and early 2022. I think the landscape has changed massively. Companies like Jaya that are not a traditional [00:31:00] defense manufacturer. That can rapidly adapt and pivot to meet different applications.

I think it's resonating. When you look at companies like Anduril, like Palantir they're disrupting the defense market right now. And I think there's an appetite and recognition for companies that can really quickly adapt to meet the needs of the customer is incredibly important.

ABIGAIL: with the slash budget, they're going to be looking for economical tools. 

IAN: And that's exciting for us as a company.

ABIGAIL: You said, the funding market tends to be very specific. People tend to invest in very specific things and I think a challenge for a company like yours is, you can be an environmental company, you can be a defense company, you're surveying, you know, your, your bots can do so much, there, there's so many different applications that I think that in itself is a little bit of a challenge.

IAN: Yeah, we were chatting to an investment banking firm a [00:32:00] couple of weeks ago in Boston, and we were going through our financials and they were, I didn't, I didn't, I hadn't recognized this and they said, your efficiency with capital is fantastic. What you guys are able to do with the capital you have and deploying your resources.

is unbelievable. And maybe I'm, that's their words, right? That's not mine. I'm like, wow, I never thought about that. So, have a 13 strong team here. We've got contractors that support us. You know, Toby, Ray and Ed that started in the very beginning are still contractors. They're part of the team.

Interestingly, they have never ever been in the same room together. With us because we started in COVID, Toby was in Hobart, Tasmania, Ed was in New Hampshire and Ray was in Florida. To this day, we've never all been in the same [00:33:00] room together, which is incredible. But again, a fun part of that story.

So the journey has been incredibly interesting to, to get to where we are today, but that deployment of resources. I think comes down to our approach to selection and when I, when I send out a job description I want to make it very, very clear that attitude and aptitude and experience can often outshine What degree you have and what school you went to.

And we've selected people on that basis. And we have people that were highlighted as being the best in class in university. And I've got a production manager was a guy that used to climb towers, fixing fiber optic cables, a thousand feet in the air for telecoms companies. So we've got a great mix.

Everybody works hard. There's an alignment around the vision, the mission. We developed a set of values [00:34:00] together. As a, as a team, which I think is incredibly powerful and that, that's used daily. We ask ourselves when we've got an issue, are we trying to deal with something? Is this aligned to the values?

And I think it's a great tool because people call me out in the team. They say, Ian, you said we should do this. But I think that's not in line with our values. And it's a great, great wake up call. And I love that about the fact that the team can highlight the fact highlight there's our values. This is, this is, this is what we've agreed about the way we should operate in doing business.

And then they're on the doors of the office before you walk in. The values are there. This is what we bring to the company every day. So we've got a super talented group of folks. We are spread thin, right, deliberately, because we need to, we need to maximize our runway. Every, every dollar is thoughtfully spent.

I, I wouldn't put [00:35:00] us as, we, frugal is a difficult kind of, I think frugal is the right term. 

ABIGAIL: In. You can say it.

IAN: yeah, okay. We, we, we're just really, really thoughtful about where we spend our money. Let me think carefully about that.

ABIGAIL: So where are you today? You have sales. You're growing. Tell, tell me about that.

IAN: 2024 was a really, really good year. And I got a bunch of stats here. We've just closed a 3 million equity round, that went very, very smoothly and very, very quickly. We started off that round with a 2 million max and a valuation that some folks questioned. We held firm on the valuation, we moved forward, and within a couple of weeks we were oversubscribed and were then, due to investor demand we increased the max to 3 million.

And we've now, in fact, I've still got people coming in today, can we invest, I'm sorry, the [00:36:00]round is closed. 2020.

You get a lot of support from that investor community, which is, is awesome and very, very grateful for that support, not just financially, but also advice and mentoring. Last year we did 1. 8 million in bookings. We got our first international orders.

Which was fantastic. We doubled our customers last year. We developed strategic partnerships in France, UK, Australia, Taiwan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Japan Malaysia. I'm currently in discussion with some folks in Vietnam. We've, we have security clearance, which allows us to get into parts of the conversation that we weren't previously allowed to.

We're embarking on our CMMC Level 2 certification, which improves our cyber resiliency. We, we, We want to put back into the community as well. So the team and our board raised over 3, 000 for Buzzards Bay Watershed and the East Bay Food Pantry. We were a founding consortium member of the Southeast New England Ocean Tech [00:37:00] Hub.

And Again, I feel really important that it's putting something back into the community to help grow jobs grow the economy in, in Rhode Island. That's, that's super important. We were all over the world. We attended over 25 plus trade shows and demos, US, UK, Netherlands, France, Republic of China, Taiwan, Australia, Portugal.

And we kicked off our Jaya cloud instantiation for data storage, visualization and global operations. And we established our customer success function. So we now have an up and running customer success function to make sure our customers are properly on boarded and looked after after delivery.

ABIGAIL: That's great. And where do you want to take this all? What's the, what's the end game here?

IAN: The end game is to grow the company to a point where we will need an injection of capital to realize The potential that is way, way over and above where [00:38:00] we can get in three years and, and hopefully can attract the attention of a strategic or an investment opportunity that helps Jaya gets to the next level through an MNA or an acquisition.

ABIGAIL: And there, there's, there's definitely a precedent, of acquisition in this, in this market. Yeah.

IAN: unmanned underwater vehicle or autonomous underwater vehicle company that's been revenue generating has been acquired and the multiples for those acquisitions have all been north of 10X.

ABIGAIL: Yeah.

IAN: Now we're entering a different time, a different period. I think the, the 30X multiples kind of, it was all about FOMO, right?

Fear of missing out. I think there's a much more, much more measured view of the market right now. But if we can get to 20, 30 million revenue I think everybody stands to do well.

ABIGAIL: And what's the time frame for 20 to 30 million revenue?

IAN: We're looking at 27 end of, to get to that, that [00:39:00] number.

ABIGAIL: So in 6 years, you'd get to 20 to 20, 20, 30 million dollar revenue. That's, that's pretty impressive. Yep.

IAN: is, and, and again, it's the appetite, right, for

ABIGAIL: Yep.

IAN: And that, that really is focusing on the U, U. S. market with a little bit of international. I see no reason why the international market couldn't match the U. S.

ABIGAIL: Well, you're already having these discussions and creating partners.

IAN: Yeah, we are hiring, right? We have got spots open for this year to add another six FDs on the sales side and the engineering side.

ABIGAIL: Will you manage all the sales or will you try to have like an intermediary in a foreign country, like a, go through another sales company?

IAN: Yeah, we have it. We have agents in the companies that we're working with. So in the Netherlands is BSS in France is EMD and Australia is first wave logistics. So we've got, we've got relationships with companies because we don't have the bandwidth to set up BD operations. Now, as the company [00:40:00] grows, then having an international office in that's regionally located makes absolute sense.

Yeah. But to develop the relationships on the UK, we have Edgar brothers. I should remember them as well. To have folks that know the market, know the customers in those areas, can speak the language is super important.

ABIGAIL: Well, I'd love to ask, , are you optimistic? I know this was inspired in part by growing up and seeing, pollution in the water and trying to figure out what you could do to help. Are you optimistic about our ability to stay ahead of sort of man made problems in the environment ?

IAN: There's no doubt that we've passed, I think, some thresholds that are going to make it very hard to reverse the climate change that we've seen. The ever increasing intensity of storms the frequency of those storms, or droughts, right? Climate change encompasses more of everything. More extreme of everything.

More droughts, more floods. Technology [00:41:00] has Often being invented or found a way to solve really, really difficult problems. And I think there are enough smart people in the world that with a collective intellectual horsepower can figure this out. Administratively. We're in a pretty interesting time right now, and I look at that as being a bump in the road. But I think people will recognize, as the intensity and frequency of these extreme climate events, they cannot be ignored. There will be an overwhelming need, demand, to change, to do something.

ABIGAIL: And I think that's going to have to happen on a personal and community level at this point.

IAN: Yeah, and it's a global problem, right? There's not one country that can do it on its own.

ABIGAIL: right,

IAN: And we're not dependent on one country to do it.

ABIGAIL: right 

IAN: yeah, we're [00:42:00] in super interesting times. Buckle up.

ABIGAIL: that's for sure. Yeah, I'm going to get my own drone bot JayaBot. And you, you know, you've actually peppered this podcast with, with wonderful morsels of advice, but I was wondering if you didn't have one last one that you wanted to end up on.

IAN: Be kind. I think what goes around comes around. And kindness doesn't cost anything. And don't mistake kindness for weakness.

ABIGAIL: That's, that's a keen observation. I think that's a beautiful, beautiful place to end. Thank you so much Ian for coming on. It's just been a joy. I'm really excited for all you're doing and, and your wonderful success down there in Rhode Island.

IAN: Thank you so much and please come visit.